


your next engagement

by tigrrmilk



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dorian's Childhood, Gen, M/M, but so is everywhere else, kirkwall is a terrible place, tevinter worldbuilding that probably contradicts canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:50:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3734566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Right,” Dorian says. He thinks about saying, "It hurt me too, our old bastard homeland". But he doesn’t. Too late, the doors in his brain swing open in the draught and he thinks, there are many different ways that it hurts, and I do not own them. He doesn’t even know what they look like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your next engagement

**Author's Note:**

> a few things to warn for: this deals with canon-typical homophobia in tevinter and dorian's father's attempt to change him with blood magic, although it does not go into explicit detail. 
> 
> it also contains references to slavery in tevinter, and dorian's attitudes towards it in canon (although they're not unchallenged).
> 
> i have had fun with worldbuilding with tevinter, but i am sure that i have veered wildly from canon, so view this as mildly AU if you wish.

 

 

 

World, empty of me as I am of you now,  
Let me ask of you nothing.

\-- Harry Fainlight, A BRIDE

 

 

 

What are the things that remind Dorian of his childhood?

Deep red rugs that make him think of spices, somehow. The grapes sent from his father’s favourite vineyard that had skins thicker than human skin. Olive oil is much harder to find here, and nobody bathes in it - he’d never realised, until he left (that first time, so long ago, and yet), how much it permeates everything back home. How you could tell who somebody was - or what their lot in life was, which was _usually_ the same thing - by their smell.

He’s not sure why the first things he thinks of all have to do with _food_. Maybe something to examine another time. But then again, maybe it’s not that difficult to understand.

What is being a child? Lots of new sensations, a brain that isn’t fully... yet. Except for as long as he can remember, Dorian was told - you are clever. You will do great things. This is your tutor. He will help you reach the heights that are your _birthright_.

Where was the rug? Deep in one of the circle’s many towers. Green fires in every grate, purple grapes growing on the walls like ivy, “don’t eat the fade-touched fruit, you don’t know where its roots have been.” He grew up in long, long lessons on old magic, fade folklore, how to conjure fire. When he was close to being of age, he was taught the darker things - blood magic (“you should at least know the basics,” Julian said, and little more, the words “don’t tell your father” were, like many things, always unsaid), some spells that he was sure didn’t quite count as blood magic but -- probably weren’t entirely separate from it either... and then, Necromancy.

Dorian is very good at Necromancy. He is very good at everything, of course - although he tried not to be _too_ good at blood magic - but there is something about Necromancy that is effortless, that is a feeling, not a thought. Like fire. Like magic is dreamed of. It is not usual, which makes it seem... well, kind of glamorous, Dorian thinks. He would have hated to have blended in. Thank the maker - hell, thank the old gods and anyone else who’s listening in, too - that at least he’s not a healer.

He thinks other things, too.

 _What does it say about me,_ Dorian wonders on his eighteenth birthday, _what does it mean that I have spent my whole life learning magic, and the type of magic that has chosen me - is this_.

Dorian has not seen that many dead people. He is young.

 

***

 

“You’re from Tevinter?” Dorian asks. It’s a cold night. He’s at the bar in the pitiful excuse for a tavern the inquisition has managed to conjure up (no, not conjure, and isn’t that part of the problem), but as the words leave his mouth, he thinks - he thinks, _maybe I shouldn’t_. His voice sounds strange to him. Outside his body, but of it. Like a spell. But the wrong one.

“Yep,” Krem says. He doesn’t look at him. He has a hand on the bar. He raises his other hand to his mouth, bites slightly at the skin over one of his knuckles, then puts that hand down and spreads it out across the bar, too.

The bartender is too busy being rude to somebody else to come and release either of them from this situation.

“Right,” Dorian says. He thinks about saying, _It hurt me too, our old bastard homeland_. But he doesn’t. Too late, the doors in his brain swing open in the draught and he thinks, there are many different ways that it hurts, and I do not own them. He doesn’t even know what they look like.

He stands there and says nothing. He thinks, is it worth buying the wine, is it worth it, and that’s another thing, that’s another thing. No proper grapes, no proper wine. They don’t mix it in bowls. There’s nobody around to do that for them.

 _Good_ , Dorian thinks, on that last point. _Good_. And that’s another thing he’s barely allowed to think about. Or, another thing he _should_ think about. He thinks about talking to the inquisitor -- but not tonight. He’s not had _nearly_ enough to drink. But who is there to drink with?

He slips out of the door to the tavern as it swings in the wind, and only his natural grace and poise keep him from crashing into the Iron Bull, who’s just - standing there.

Dorian raises his hands and takes a step back. _I didn’t mean to_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t say anything out loud. “I don’t bite,” the Iron Bull says. He has a lot of mouth, Dorian thinks.

“No,” Dorian says. “You’ve got other weapons, haven’t you.” He holds his hands to his forehead in fists and then sticks his fore-and-ring-fingers up in a crude approximation of horns. He feels lightheaded. Why not thoroughly alienate every member of the Inquisition’s most elite, alarming mercenaries (who... are they being paid? Do they even _count_ as mercenaries anymore?) in one evening? Maybe he should have eaten dinner.

The Iron Bull laughs, long, and loud. “Do you think I am a _bunny_?” he asks.

Dorian doesn’t really know what to make of this question. “I meant your horns,” he says. “You know, those big pointy things on your head. _Surely_ you’ve come across them.” He flicks his fingers out a couple of times for good measure.

“People usually just use one finger to indicate a horn,” the Iron Bull says.

“But they’re so... thick,” Dorian says. He lowers his hands.

“Hmm,” the Iron Bull says. He has a very intense gaze.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Dorian says, in his _most_ dignified voice, and flees.

 

***

 

When he’s seventeen, in the months before he comes of age, Dorian and Julian work together on a variety of intricate, arcane spells. Julian is one of the circle’s most promising scholars, and he’s very interested in ancient elven magic.

“Our empire was built on it,” he says, more than once. It’s clear to Dorian that he thinks that this is how the empire will become great once again. Dorian isn’t yet sure that this the entirely wrong thing to hope for, but he’s on his way there. He has a secret, and that secret - well. It’s been a while since he could fully think about matters from the position he was _born_ to. It’s been a while since he found himself looking at everything from odd angles, pressed up against the doorframe, almost, almost, but not quite. In a different room.

He knows better than to say any of this out loud. He is, of course, _very_ clever.

Some of the spells take weeks to cast -- Dorian can hardly tell when he is sleeping, or when he’s awake. He isn’t aware of who brings him food, of who _bathes_ him, of when he uses the bathroom. Maybe he doesn’t eat, and so maybe he doesn’t have to use the bathroom, and maybe it’s magic that keeps his skin clear and fragrant. But then again. He says to Julian, “this is not magic for mortal men,” and Julian laughs.

“Who _do_ you think it’s for then?” Julian asks.

 

***

 

Dorian still isn’t sure why he chose Julian to tell - but his parents were too remote, unthinkable, and there wasn’t really anybody else. Other apprentices? No, it wasn’t the same. And -- and besides. Julian’s older, would know - would be a better example.

His feelings about the importance of the _Empire_ , and a lecture he once gave Dorian about the ways he planned to use magic to help breed out defects of his family line (he listed them to Dorian, quite dispassionately) should probably have been a sign. Julian blinks at him, and says, “that’s what slaves are for.” He doesn’t say anything else.

Julian had accompanied Dorian to his first meeting with his betrothed, months before. She wore a crinkly blue dress, and swore every time she opened her mouth. Dorian hadn’t disliked her.

Dorian says, “what an uncivilised response,” and then leaves. It was like the words had scrolled out of his mouth on a long white banner, the kind drawn into political cartoons in the pamphlets found at any disreputable tea-house. It was like he could see them in front of him. What did they have to do with him? Well, everything.

He breathes deeply as he goes down the spiral staircase, and he emerges into a wide quadrangle. The buildings are made of stone, and covered in creeping plants of every colour he can think of. He takes clippings from a few before he leaves. He wonders if Julian is looking out of his window, but he doesn’t look up. The gate is iron, and cold under his hand.

 

***

 

Julian was, at least, a representative example.

“We know, darling,” his mother says, when he finally decides to tell her. “Is that a spot of dirt on your cheek?”  
  
Dorian rubs at his cheek with his hand, and she says, “No, the other one,” and when he moves his hand to wipe his other cheek, she says, “oh, it’s a _blemish_.” Dorian thinks, she _can’t_ understand. She has heard the words she wanted to hear.

“I don’t have blemishes, I have beauty spots,” Dorian says, not unreasonably. He doesn’t respond to the other thing. “Really, mother.”

“Plenty of men keep slaves for lovers, it’s not a matter for concern,” she says. “You will still be married in the spring.” No; she is cleverer than Dorian remembers. She will change his words to the best-case scenario; the scenario that she is able to survive without making any real change.

Maker, but have you ever been to Tevinter wedding?

Dorian has a robe-fitting the week after that. His mother has been talking of nothing but the _finest_ imported fabrics for weeks. His cousin, two years older, was married in a kind of muslin that shone, but when you examined it, you realised that it reflected nothing. It looked the same in every light. But if you said the right words, it filled with stars. Real stars. Not the pointy approximations of art, or of any other kind of imperfect, human representation. A shifting look into the heavens themselves, in place of a map. Where was it from? Who had enchanted it? Surely nobody from Orzammar. Surely nobody who had never seen the stars themselves.

“Such a shame about his wife,” his mother had sighed, that day, at the reception. Dorian didn’t know what was wrong with his wife. She was short, with a smile that bared all of her teeth. But it was a real smile. Her eyes crinkled. She had made her bouquet herself. His cousin didn’t seem to see anything wrong with her, either. He was a fool, of course. All of Dorian’s kinsmen were fools. But he at least seemed to be happy about it.

There had been dancing, and a pale cake with deep green flecks that were from a nut that Dorian had never tasted before. A new type of nut, _imagine_. Where did it come from? Was it magic? Dorian felt something stir in his belly. The cream between the slices of cake was thin, and strong. Solid. Almost like gum. He had never tasted anything like it. Stuck to the roof of his mouth.

 

***  
  
  
“Mother,” Dorian says, a few days after his first attempt. “Mother. The thing is, I can’t marry her.”

She doesn’t look up from the pianoforte that she is in the middle of charming. It is to be violet, rather than pastel yellow, for a soiree that she is hosting next week in honour of a newly-appointed magister. Dorian has never seen anybody in his family use magic in such a... _domestic_ setting. It’s all she can do to not turn it into a summer spring surrounded by real violets. If Dorian half-closes his eyes, he can see it. She needs to imagine what she wants as the _whole_ thing, and not as a halfway point to something greater, something bolder.

Dorian’s not sure how great teaching this to her would be in the long run. Besides. He is too young to teach anybody anything.

“Don’t be ludicrous, darling,” his mother says.

“I am being perfectly reasonable,” Dorian says. “Just imagine it - Livia would last six months with me and then she’d put a fist of deathroot in my nightcap and just like that, no more Dorian. Such a waste of all of this good breeding.”

His mother looks at him. The pianoforte is glowing, and the room smells of cut grass.

“Livia is a perfectly charming, if _spirited_ girl,” his mother says. “I was younger than her when I married your father, and I was _far_ younger than you are.”

Dorian wants to say, what about the other thing. And because Dorian is no longer the man he was at eighteen, he does.

“Mother,” he says. “You know full well why I don’t want to marry her.”

“Not this again,” she says. She crosses her hands through the air forcefully and the piano starts to levitate, just high enough that the throw covering it is no longer touching the ground either. She circles it in her quiet, slippered feet, and then crosses her hands in the air again, and it settles back down. It is perfect. The colour hurts Dorian’s eyes. She leans forward and plays a chord that’s so melancholy that it’s like it’s ripping through the air, coming for him, about to break Dorian’s chest in half.

 

***

 

Dorian had always been... ostentatious. Julian had spent much of Dorian’s early teens trying to teach him to conserve magic, how to get the most out of every last piece of stamina that his body could hold. How to use everything he had. When the buzz inside him meant, _there’s something left_ , and when the buzz it left afterwards meant, _and now you’re going to die_.

It’s not like he didn’t pay attention. If you’ve got him in a fight to the death, he can still do it. He won’t go down on less.

But not everything’s a fight to the death. Because Dorian refuses to let it be. He does not always needs to be economical. He is rich. And he refuses to let magic be _healthy_.

 

***

 

What happened after he walked out of Julian’s tower room? Dorian thought, I will never go back. And he didn’t.

It takes him a while to realise that Julian has not told his family _why_. “I hear your preliminary studies are over,” his father says at breakfast, a week on.

“Yes,” Dorian says. He does not volunteer anything else.

“I have received a number of enquiries, ah -- _offers_ , for your next engagement,” he says.

“Yes?” Dorian says. How he _loves_ engagements.

“But I don’t think it’s good for a young man to bounce straight from one teacher to another,” his father says. “Not at this critical juncture -- not when you have just become a man.”

Dorian licks a fleck of honey from the place where his palm meets his wrist, and then rubs his hands together.

“I think it’s time to start planning your grand tour,” his father says, and soon they push the food off the table and roll out a vast map, the likes of which Dorian has never seen.

 

***

 

“The tour would, I suspect, have been more impressive had I undertaken it a number of centuries ago,” Dorian says to a total stranger. The total stranger looks like he’s about to brain Dorian with his tankard, but since Dorian paid for the drink that’s in it (and the drinks in the bellies and cups of just about everybody else in this blighted tavern), he doesn’t.

“Yes,” Dorian says. “You see, that’s exactly it. Everybody has that reaction. Just think what it would have been like when we were in charge.” He sighs, deeply. “Better clothes, for a start.”

The man really does move to hit him this time, but Dorian is very quick. “Ah,” he says, his hands spread. “Forgive me - I forget that not everybody understands, ah, _shares_ , the Tevinter sense of humour.”

Dorian is nineteen, now, and Kirkwall is not at all like he had imagined. Something about the term _city-state_ , and the small clusters on the big map, had made him think of cities unlike anything else. Cities with everything you could need. Cities that have enough to be their own country, and to hell with the rest. Something like a perfect closed circle.

Oh, yes. It’s _that_ year. The blight in Ferelden is starting to dawn. Or rather, to draw in. The gates are not closed to refugees yet - but they have started to appear. And then there are people who have always lived in Kirkwall and who should have settled into their lives long ago who are starving, anyway. When it rains, shit runs through the streets. Sometimes when it doesn’t rain, too.

When Dorian first left Tevinter, he was struck by - - more than anything, by how quiet the rest of Thedas was. There was less magic in the air. It didn’t speak to him as it once could. He breathed differently. His lungs held a different shape. But the smell is a close second, especially in Kirkwall, and when he wakes up in the morning, it is the smell that he notices first. He scrubs with pumice and ashes and whatever oils he can find at market, and he looks into the mirror, and nothing looks back at him. There is only give, and nothing takes.

Kirkwall is _loud_ , but it’s a different type of loud. And so Dorian makes his jokes. It’s fine, nobody will remember them anyway. How can anybody even hear him?

He does not quite know what he is supposed to do here - the tower is kept, as far as he can find out.. savagely, and the templars would never allow a foreign mage, a Tevinter mage (not a Magister, although it’s unlikely they would understand that) who is free to travel to use their library. They would declare him an apostate, despite his circle ring.

Probably nothing worth reading anyway.

He thinks, if this is what you southerners have instead of slavery, then to hell with all of you and your high morals. But crucially, a thing he _doesn’t_ think: slavery is better. He has been away from home for almost a year. It was his birthday three weeks before.

He would have thought that once, he thinks.

It is not until years later that he truly breaks this way of thinking, although he doesn’t know it yet.

He leaves the tavern with his crown unbroken, his neck uncut, which is no small miracle. Except Dorian is nineteen, and a Tevinter mage. He’s not sure if he believes in the Maker, and he certainly doesn’t believe in anything like miracles. There is magic, and there is the absence of magic.

 

***

 

“What did magic ever do to you, anyway?” Not a question you want to hear all of the answers to. “Did it show you just how mundane your life is, without it? Do you resent it for that?”  
  
Don’t, Dorian. Leave that alone.

 

***

 

Where else did Dorian go? Hossberg, in the Anderfels. It was too hot, but Dorian liked it anyway. Nobody seemed to give a shit about him, which was a quality in a place he grew to appreciate more after he left it behind. He could have dealt without the constant fear that darkspawn were going to appear and taint him while he slept, though. Then... Antiva City. The good parts of Orlais (villas, in the summer, with distant cousins he’d never met before). He was considering Ferelden, but decided in the end that it was too cold, too much of a mess.

And then it was too much at risk of falling to the blight. Dorian had finally discovered how best to wear his hair and moustache in order to optimise his exceedingly handsome looks. He had no desire to lose it all to the taint of darkspawn so _soon_.

 

***

 

In all that long year he was away, he never dreamed of a place that wasn’t home.

 

***

 

The first time he finds himself consciously casting outside of Tevinter - they’re travelling to Hossberg, still, and the carriage has been thrown from the horse - Dorian almost falters. The air is quiet, and thin, but he didn’t realise until now what that would mean. It’s a different kind of work - although, he realises a while later, it’s not more _difficult_. But his brain has to open differently. He has to breathe more.

Adapt quicker, you fool, he thinks. Killed by a hurlock with a mangled longbow with your feel sinking into the sand is no way to go.

 

***

 

“Mother,” he says, a few days after his last attempt. He is twenty-two, and his grand tour is quickly sinking into childhood memory.

“Dorian,” she says. “I do not wish to speak of this again. Soon, I will have to involve your father.”

“My,” he says. “Such conclusions. I may have just been priming a comment on the spun-sugar baubles that are decorating the staircase today.”

His mother looks at him, and the words he wanted to say melt in his mouth, yes, like spun sugar does.

 

***

 

The Iron Bull says, the next time they find themselves at camp, “I’ve been trying to decide which animal _you_ are most like.”

Dorian tenses, and says, “a pretty snake, like all of the other vints, I expect. Probably a _really_ venomous one.”

The Iron Bull looks... amused, and says, “snakes are cold-blooded. I was thinking of something more... fiery.”

The Iron Bull has been itching to kill a high dragon ever since they first sighted one, North East in the Hinterlands, so it figures.

Varric has two pencils behind his ear. He likes to sharpen them by the fire and throw the shavings to the flames. He looks between them, and slowly starts to raise his hand to take one of them up.

Dorian leaves the tent before either of them gives him any more material.

 

***

 

Dorian spends the bulk of his twenties working for, or _with_ , Alexius. He’s a _Magister_ , with a much more radical view of magic than Dorian, in all of those years he’d worked with Julian, had ever dreamed was possible. Dorian thinks of all of those sad worlds he visited that had done their best to suppress what was as natural to him as waking, as sleeping.

“I think you will find him interesting,” Dorian’s father had said. His voice was strained. Dorian had been at a loose end for more than a year, ever since he had returned from his travels -- the offers that had been made only a year before had been withdrawn, positions already filled, and people had heard -- well, people had heard stories. Stories that had originated with Dorian, mostly. Honestly, what’s the point in going on a grand tour if you can’t tell stories about it afterwards?

And at least it beats, _I saw dead bodies as I left Kirkwall, and I did nothing, because there was nothing I could think of to do._

“I visited Hossberg,” Dorian says to Alexius’s son, Felix.

As a younger man, Dorian had learned how much he loved the world he lived in, and also he had learned what there was that he could not love.

He is still young, of course

“Listen,” Alexius says. He doesn’t say anything. Dorian can, of course, hear the magic. He hasn’t been able to stop hearing it since he returned, although sometimes it’s... quieter.

“Really listen,” Alexius says, and Dorian’s not sure how he can listen harder, but he tries his best. He tries his best to close his heart and his lungs and his brain and to just be ears, and then he gasps, because he can’t keep it out, he can’t, and he thinks -- he can only listen to so much of this before he has to speak. It’s always been that way.

“I’ve heard better arias,” Dorian drawls, when it’s too much for him, and Alexius looks annoyed but not too annoyed, and Felix arrives with some olive and some flatbread and the sky is hot and Dorian is even cleverer than he was at 18, and yes, Alexius takes him on.

 

***

 

The last time Dorian leaves home, he regrets that he was never able to shut his heart down. That he was never able to not hear it. The rush of blood in his ears. It would have allowed him to stay -- no, he is glad he has not stayed. That would have been too much. But maybe -- maybe leaving wouldn’t have hurt this much.

And then he thinks about his blood, and what they wanted to do, and he feels sick again. He wonders if he ever won't feel like this when he thinks of home. He puts a hand to his stomach. He thinks about Julian -- he thinks about the blood magic, that one lesson, and how he never had to tell him, _don't tell your father_ , because he _knew_. He thinks about -- the look on his father's face. He thinks about -- his mother.

But, yes, he does think about home. He thinks about it a lot in the coming weeks and months. Years later, he dreams of it. The fabric on the walls. The _grapes_. It feels silly, after all of that. But it wasn't _home_ that had tried to hurt him. Just the people in it.

 

***

 

“You miss it,” the Iron Bull says, one dawn, when Dorian is leaning on the battlements and staring out at the barren sky and the white, empty mountains. Dorian groans. Can he never have a moment’s peace.

He looks at him, and the comeback he had ready dies on his tongue. Well, no, it doesn’t. Because he’s Dorian, and he’s never been good at letting anything die.

“What’s to miss?” he says. “Surely not the elaborate meals, the beautiful clothes, the music, and the charming company of people who like to _read_.”

The Iron Bull grunts. He looks up at the sky. Dorian feels very small, which he hates. It’s not really Bull’s fault, though. It’s the fault of the _world_ , and he resents it for it.

“This is _war_ ,” Bull says, finally. “Wars end.”

“You try telling your people that,” Dorian says. He realises his mistake as soon as he says the words -- it’s been weeks since that wasn’t really true, although he doesn’t entirely understand what that means -- but neither of them shows it on their face.

“Not for everyone,” Bull says, cheerily, because he has _other_ people now. He always did. He always sounds like that. He’d even said _this is war_ in that tone of voice. Dorian resents that, too. _He_ was supposed to have the sunniest disposition when faced with the threat of a nasty, brutal kind of death. He’d spent a long time cultivating it.

“I’m not going back,” Dorian says. “Not until we’re done.”

“Good,” Bull says, slowly. Dorian waits for him to make some kind of crude joke, but he doesn’t, so he looks over at him. Bull is still looking up at the sky. Dorian waits for him to mention -- whatever it is that’s between them. He’s not sure if it’s anything. The longer Bull stands here, though, the more it feels like it _is_ something. The air thrums in a different way than he’s used to.

Dorian does his best not to ask, but he’s never been good at that. At not-asking. He opens his mouth, but Bull takes his hand and kisses his knuckles, and the words die on his tongue. “I’d miss it here,” Dorian says, and then frowns. “Actually, it’s more that I think all of you would miss me. Terribly so.”

“Terribly so,” Bull agrees, the words sounding strange in his mouth, and Dorian laughs, and Bull kisses the inside of his palm this time, and Dorian takes his hand back.

“It’s far too early in the morning for _that_ ,” he says, and Bull only grumbles slightly in response.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! do come and talk to me/yell at me [on tumblr](http://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com/) if you want :D


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